Flying colours

They were the coded message carriers, birds who really did earn their corn. Race organiser Richard Wade is suitably on-message, too.

“People look at pigeons and call them flying rats, or whatever, but racing pigeons are different. These birds are better looked after than some bairns are,” he says. “This will be the biggest race in the 2014 calendar. For a pigeon man, winning it is like winning the Derby.”

Flying from their allotment garden loft in West Auckland, Richard and his brother Martin – whose parents both served in the forces – are among the top men in the North East Homing Union, stretching from Morpeth to Richmond.

“We wanted to do something because the pigeons’ role was absolutely crucial,” says Richard.

“Some were shot down because the information they carried was so vital, some got home wounded or through the most terrible conditions. We tend to forget too easily.”

The birds were bred in Army camp lofts, and on the Queen’s estate at Sandringham. In the First World War they crossed the Channel by sea; in the Second World War many Bomber Command planes carried two pigeons – particularly useful in returning with location details in the event of mishap.

In 1943, Maria Dickin – founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals – inaugurated the Dickin Medal, regarded as the animals’ VC, for wartime heroes. Before the conflict ended, it had been won by 31 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and a cat. Twelve have been awarded subsequently, most recently in April to an Army dog working in Afghanistan.

The medal’s inscription is simple: “We also serve,” it says.

THE Wade brothers’ loft is comfortably furnished. Visitors get hot chocolate, resident birds get best corn.

“Don’t get it wrong,” says Richard. “You don’t just rattle a tin of corn and become a champion pigeon man. They have to be bred, they have to be trained, they have to be looked after.”

Martin had just released some birds on a training flight at Catterick. Unusually – “it normally takes them about 17 minutes” – he’d beaten the pigeons back. The early evening being overcast, the birds had rather denied their renowned instincts by heading south towards Leeming Bar.

No sign, no worry. “They’ll be here,” says Martin, though he’s outside muttering “Ha’way, lass” in the manner of a hind with a recalcitrant cow.

NONE can explain nature’s ingenuity, though a familiar training method – known as “widowhood” – relies upon the oldest instinct of all. In the weeks before a race, the cock bird is denied the company (shall we say) of a hen, but is “shown” her on the night before liberation.

“Let’s just say it gives the birds a bit of an incentive to get home again,” says Richard. “Some suppose it’s about magnetic fields, some that it’s about recognising landmarks. How can you recognise a landmark if you’ve never flown that way before?”

The race is on July 19. Sponsors have been generous, Richard’s confident they’re on a winner. “We normally fly from France, but this is Belgium. This time, we hope, there’ll be no one trying to shoot them down.”

THE moggy which won the Dickin Medal was Able Seacat Simon, found on a Hong Kong dockside, adopted by the crew of HMS Amethyst and fond of sleeping in the captain’s cap.

Said to work wonders for morale – though not, perhaps, among the lower decks rat population which sedulously he eradicated – Simon suffered shrapnel wounds in the Yangtse Incident in 1949, but still went about his duties.

The captain had been killed in the incident, the ship taken over by Lt Cdr John Kerans who won the DSO for masterminding the Amethyst’s escape from Chinese waters, but was said to have been “indifferent” towards the champion ratter.

Ten years later, Cdr Kerans became Tory MP for Hartlepool, though he was beaten in 1964.

No doubt because of Kerans’s alleged indifference towards Able Seacat Simon, the good folk of Hartlepool have never again returned a Conservative.

BACK to the First World War, and to born-again Seaham where the statue of Tommy inevitably echoes Kipling: For it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that an’ “Chuck him out, the brute”, But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

The Durham coast town may also be England’s ice cream cornet capital.

Even at 5pm on a grey Saturday, they’re queuing in the street outside Lickety Split. A few doors away there’s a Mr Whippy outlet, perhaps an exercise in self-flagellation.

There’s now a yacht-bobbing marina, a lifeboat and heritage museum and who among the miners of Dawdon and Vane Tempest might have guessed that one day Seaham would have a jet-ski club?

Tommy crouches steadfastly on the sward overlooking the sea, swift and successful fundraising permanently to dock him there nearing its £85,000 outcome.

There was a raffle – “fantastic prizes” – T-shirts and crowds. The nearby bouncy castle may have been coincidental, but Tommy’s properly acknowledged now.

SEAHAM Town Council – motto “Strength and courage” – was organising large screen film nights as part of the carnival.

Last Friday, 5-11pm, was Ladies’ Night. Wouldn’t it have been a bit more courageous to have one for the men?

THEY all did brilliantly, Gary Verity’s knighthood surely in a saddlebag on its way up the A1, but those of us who enjoy the dales for their tranquillity headed hurriedly in the opposite direction last Saturday.

So to Holy Island, the village itself populous with the sacred and the secular, but the path round the island’s extremities little trodden.

The unexpected bonus: at 4pm, Crook and Weardale Choral Society was performing St Cuthbert’s Cantata in St Mary’s church. Cuthbert was the 7th Century shepherd boy who became Abbot and then Bishop of Lindisfarne. He found the island a bit crowded, even before the coach parties and cream teas, and took himself off to a rocky hermitage on Farne. His bones are in Durham Cathedral.

The society is led by Roger Kelly, Crook lad and former chief executive of Gateshead Council. They were splendid, Alan Coombes excelling on the organ and Sue Amos – good pedigree, that – on the piano.

Lindisfarne’s cut-off point, the tide came in at half past seven. In the Yorkshire dales it was ebbing, both places – perhaps happily – returning to their special solitude.

...and finally, a new station has opened on the Middlesbrough to Whitby railway line. Though the timetable lists it as James Cook Hospital, on the platform – a bit clinical, as might in the circumstances be supposed – it’s simply James Cook.

Since there never was a Bishop Auckland, or even a Percy Main, is this Britain’s only station to be named after a person – as opposed to a town like, say, St Alban’s? Duly consulted, former railwayman Charles Allenby recalls that there was once a station in Leicestershire called John o’ Gaunt – but that that was named after a nearby fox covert.

Pulling out all the stops, railway loving readers may know differently.